From Agency Creative Director to Solo Builder
After fourteen years at agencies like R/GA and Eight Inc, I walked away to build products end-to-end. Here's why — and what I've learned since.
I spent fourteen years inside agencies. R/GA London, Eight Inc, a handful of studios in between. I designed for Virgin Atlantic, Emirates, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, De Beers. I led teams, won awards, built things I'm genuinely proud of. And then in 2019, I walked away from all of it.
People ask about that decision a lot, so I want to lay it out plainly — not as some neat founder-origin story, but as the messy, honest version.
The agency ceiling
At a certain level in agency life, your job stops being about making things and starts being about selling the idea of making things. You're in pitches, writing decks, managing stakeholders. The actual design work drifts downstream to more junior hands. That's fine for some people. For me it was suffocating.
I'd joined the industry because I loved the craft — the pixel-level decisions, the typography, the systems. The further I climbed, the less of that I touched. I was a creative director who didn't create anything.
The CognitionX pivot
When I joined CognitionX as Design Director in 2019, it felt like a reset. Smaller team, real product work, genuine impact. Then COVID hit and we had to pivot a physical AI conference to a fully virtual platform — 50,000 attendees, built in weeks. That experience taught me something important: I work best under real constraints, on real products, with real users. Not on brand guidelines that sit in a PDF.
It also taught me I could ship. Not just design — ship. The full stack, from concept to deployment. That realisation changed everything.
Going solo
I founded HowMightWe Studio back in 2013 as a side practice, but by 2024 I was ready to go all-in. The thesis was simple: I wanted to be a design engineer — someone who designs and builds, end to end, with no handoff gap.
The modern stack makes this possible in a way it wasn't ten years ago. Next.js, Tailwind, Convex, Vercel — I can go from sketch to production in days, not quarters. The tools caught up to the ambition.
What actually changed
Here's what I didn't expect: the hardest part isn't the work. The hardest part is the identity shift. In an agency you're defined by your title, your team, your client roster. Solo, you're defined by what you ship. That's terrifying and liberating in equal measure.
Three things I've learned since making the switch:
Scope is everything. The fastest way to fail solo is to over-promise. I scope ruthlessly now — five-day sprints, not six-month roadmaps.
Revenue follows craft. Every client I've landed came from someone seeing actual work, not a pitch deck. The portfolio is the pitch.
Loneliness is real. Agency life has camaraderie built in. Solo work requires you to build that deliberately — communities, co-working, collaboration.
Where I'm headed
Right now I'm building products at the intersection of music, AI, and design infrastructure. Protomuse is my main venture — a platform for independent musicians to manage rights and metadata. ProtoForge is the royalty engine underneath it. And this portfolio is both a showcase and a live experiment in how I build.
I don't regret the agency years. They gave me taste, rigour, and an understanding of how large organisations think. But I'm not going back. The work I do now — designing, building, shipping — is the closest I've been to why I started in the first place.
The goal was never to leave the industry. It was to get back to the part of it I actually loved.